Terran Last Gun’s Antique Accounting Ledgers Tell New Stories
Artist Terran Last Gun (Piikani), who grew up on Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation, uses antique accounting ledgers—many sourced from Montana—as the basis for geometric drawings that engage the history of the US–Canada border along the 49th parallel. The ledgers document settler-colonial expansion and contain micro-histories, which Last Gun overlays with ink and colored-pencil forms that range from flat color fields to densely worked marks. He incorporates stylized motifs related to Blackfoot lodges, hides, and war shirts while avoiding disclosure of sacred details, and he also references modernist abstraction and artists he studied at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, where he earned a museum studies degree in 2016. His practice departs from 19th-century Plains ledger art traditions that often featured figurative narratives on blank ledger pages, instead using the charged grid structure to explore history through abstraction.
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This story was covered in Restitution Returns, Museums Face the Axe